Guess that someone has figured out that AdSense will pay big dollars for Asbestos click-throughs. [here]
Guess everyone is getting rich except Halliburton and WR Grace.
Month: February 2005
Bay Area: Here I Come!
I have a bunch of client visits in the Bay Area on March 2-3. Looking forward to being back on my old stomping grounds…Pancho Villa Tacqueria!
Cool features of the Slurp! Bot
Yahoo Search Blog has a great posting on how the Slurp Bot tries to conserve bandwidth by making use of compression and cache-control headers. [here]
As a Web performance fanatic, it is heartening to see that these folks have taken such care, and put such thought into their indexing crawler. They want it to be accurate, but they don’t want to slam your site.
A while back, I had to write a robots.txt file for WebPerformance to keep the MSNBot from stomping the site on a daily basis. This site uses frames and query variables to produce the various performance graphs. Well, the MSNBot was indexing every page and every variation almost daily. Finally, I said go away, just to that crawler. All the others are fine. Maybe MSN Search should take a page from the Yahoo! (Inktomi) Bot development team.
How big companies manage their Brand Image
Jennifer Rice points us to the Honeywell site where the company explains how they manage their brand image.
It is actually something that I am familiar with, as our company went through a similar process last year, so that everything that the company put out had a unified look and feel, and that everyone was able to understand what the core vision was.
There has been some drifting, but even in a small company like mine, managing the brand and presenting a unified vision of the company makes you loom much larger.
There are a number of companies I have come across that don’t understand the need to present a clear, concise and focused brand image. When I see presentations or documents from these organizations, it does not matter how successful they are, or how cool their technology is. I have reached a level in my life that I want a level of maturity in the material that I am presented with.
Acting and speaking and writing with a unified voice indicates that the company is organized and focused on their own success. That will win me over every time.
Comments on the kuro5hin Blogging HOWTO
BL Ochman has her comments here. Her comments on the blogging pundits/evangelists/wild-eyed fanatics at the end of the article. Sort of the same way I feel about PodCasting.
The Head Lemur also makes a brief, yet sarcastic note of this…
Maybe I should read the original now…
Chuck is getting married…
Prince Charles, heir the British throne, will be marrying his companion, Camilla Park er Bowles in early April. [here]
Why do I care? Well, I am a citizen of the Commonwealth, so I still great affection for the British monarchy. But as well, Charles and I have this odd tie — we were born on the same day, twenty years apart.
So every day, on my birthday, I raise my glass and drink a toast to the Prince of Wales.
And I will do the same on April 8.
The things you do will get noticed
Yesterday, I received some major kudos on a project that I developed for my personal Web site about 2 years ago. It sucked about 3 weeks of my time during a lull at work, and I got to learn a lot of very cool things.
When I was contacted yesterday, there was also some discussion that this little side-project helped resolve a large roadblock that this person was encountering in a project that they were working on with a tight deadline. The writer also could not believe that I was giving this information away for free, given the amount of time and resources that this very knowledgeable person had invested in finding the information, before he found my site.
It is always good to get positive feedback on something you have done out of personal interest. It motivated me to go back and re-examine this project and see how I could improve it further.
THank you.
Someone else is advocating Cache-Control policies
Learn how to do this on your servers. You will:
- Have faster loading pages
- Reduce your bandwidth costs
Who’s against that?
Strategist Block
I have been trying to fight through a block I have had regarding a strategic survey I am working on. I can’t plough through the wall, so I think I will take my notes home and try and brainstorm when I have some peace and solitude. Get up early, and spend some quiet time in the attic and watch the snow fall, and try and put myself in the customers shoes and understand the kind of questions they might…or might not…have.
How do other people with busy families and small children do this? How do they get the time to be creative and strategic, will not short-changing the other vital aspects of their lives?
Help?